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[cainvstheworld]

The Phlebotomist by Cain Birch

This is a persona poem from the perspective of my phlebotomist (person who draws my blood). It's a bit different than what I normally post on here, but I wrote it for my creative writing class and liked how it turned out.

[Text ID: The Phlebotomist by Cain Birch. The youngest tremble more than the graying, the grayed. Some of the children beg, barter with their parents, howl at the sun as I borrow their blood with a slender needle, but I offer every flavor of lollipop, so their pain is not fruitless. My heart breaks most for the ones whose fathers extract crumpled doctor’s orders from their jangling pockets, whose mothers offer tight smiles as their child squeezes their eyes shut, stilling, accustomed to the burn of the needle. I call out girls’ names into the waiting room and choppy-haired boys follow me into the sterile room, let me slide silver into the tender crooks of their elbows, measuring the hormones in their budding bodies. I call out a man’s name, and a woman with a five o’clock shadow coating her cheeks holds her arm ramrod straight for me. I don’t know how to ask her  what she’d like to be called, whether the “Samuel” in her chart should spell “Samantha” instead, perhaps “Iris” or “Rose.” Instead, I make small talk about the prices of gas, of chicken. I don’t tell her that the fried chicken my husband brings home grows cold by the time I arrive, that I do not turn on the heat in my hatchback even though my car’s engine sputters into the frigid night as I turn the key. I don’t tell her that I chew the tough meat without the microwave’s aid, so my husband’s breath, his still body is molten by comparison when I slide into the sheets next to him, drawing warmth into my bones, pretending the fire between us is more than a fading flicker. He wakes me up before dawn, before leaving to fill in the northeast's endless potholes, fills me up for a few minutes, catches his breath as he slides on his belt, his dirt-caked boots, kisses me with a closed mouth. I lay in the nest of blankets, let my mind slither off to hopeful gardens. In a few weeks, I will call a child’s name for the last time, his ailments healing, his parents glowing with quiet optimism. In a few months, I’ll call a woman’s name, Heather, and she’ll stick out her arm, ramrod straight, beaming. I won’t know what to say, but I’ll smile back at her. /End ID]

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

The country that once boasted the world’s first coal-fired power plant is now set to eliminate the highly polluting fossil fuel from its power grid.

In late September, the United Kingdom will shutter the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, the country’s last operational coal-fired power plant. The closure indicates just how far the U.K. has come in its bid to do away with dirty sources of electricity. 

The rapid change was made possible by the U.K.’s embrace of wind power, both on- and offshore. Over the last decade, this form of renewable energy has surged in the U.K., from generating around 8 percent of the country’s electricity in 2013 to 29 percent in 2023. Coal has plummeted over that same time period, falling from 36 percent of power generation to 1 percent last year — and then to a (literally) vanishingly small portion this year.

The country’s grid cleanup comes amid a backdrop of declining electricity demand. The U.K. used 17 percent less electricity in 2023 than it did in 2013, per Ember, as households adopted more efficient appliances, natural gas prices rose, and its economy shifted away from energy-intensive manufacturing jobs. Demand has continued to decline even as the country has started to embrace heat pumps and electric vehicles.

As a result of the U.K.’s rapidly decarbonizing grid and falling electricity demand, emissions from the country’s power sector have taken a nosedive, helping the nation reduce overall emissions to the lowest levels since 1879 — three years before that first coal-fired power station was even built.

Still, planet-warming fossil gas remains the single biggest source of electricity in the U.K. The country has led the way in moving past one form of polluting power, but now it will have to do the same with another if it is to meet its rapidly approaching goal of decarbonizing the grid by 2035.

[bethanydelleman]

Have you done a chart on the age differences between siblings in Austen novels?

No I haven't! Welcome to...

Jane Austen Charted #21: Age Gaps Between Austen Siblings

So firstly, Jane Austen doesn't usually supply birthdates, we only know the Elliot family, Robert Martin, and Harriet Smith if I remember correctly, so all of these are estimates. It's possible that Kitty Bennet was born in November 1802 and Lydia January 1804 and that is still technically two years, though not 24 months.

However, still interesting how nicely spaced the children are in most families. I imagine people understood that having babies immediately after the other was bad for women's health. Also, breastfeeding was going through a renaissance among the upper class.

Some ages just aren't given, these are the families with enough data.

Northanger Abbey:

Sense & Sensibility:

Pride & Prejudice:

I find the age gap between the Darcys interesting. It's possible Lady Anne suffered a string of miscarriages.

Mansfield Park:

Math tells us Mrs. Price also had a stillborn or infant death, so she had 11 full term pregnancies in 14 years. 😬

Emma:

John's freaking age isn't given! Ga!

Persuasion:

Ahhhhhh, exact dates. Delightful.

Edit: A lovely human reminded me we know Eleanor Tilney's age, so that family is now added to the charts.

[mariacallous]

What would you want to tell the next U.S. president? FP asked nine thinkers from around the world to write a letter with their advice for him or her.

Dear Madam or Mr. President,

Congratulations on your election as president of the United States. You take office at a moment of enormous consequence for a world directly impacted by the twin challenges of energy security and climate change.

Democrats and Republicans disagree on many aspects of energy and climate policy. Yet your administration has the chance to chart a policy path forward that unites both parties around core areas of agreement to advance the U.S. national interest.

First, all should agree that climate change is real and worsening. The escalating threat of climate change is increasingly evident to anyone walking the streets of Phoenix in the summer, buying flood insurance in southern Florida, farming rice in Vietnam, or laboring outdoors in Pakistan. This year will almost certainly surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record.

Second, just as the energy revolution that made the United States the world’s largest oil and gas producer strengthened it economically and geopolitically, so will ensuring U.S. leadership in clean energy technologies enhance the country’s geostrategic position. In a new era of great-power competition, China’s dominance in certain clean energy technologies—such as batteries and cobalt, lithium, graphite, and other critical minerals needed for clean energy products—threatens America’s economic competitiveness and the resilience of its energy supply chains. China’s overcapacity in manufacturing relative to current and future demand undermines investments in the United States and other countries and distorts demand signals that allow the most innovative and efficient firms to compete in the global market.

Third, using less oil in our domestic economy reduces our vulnerability to global oil supply disruptions, such as conflict in the Middle East or attacks on tankers in the Red Sea. Even with the surge in U.S. oil production, the price of oil is set in the global market, so drivers feel the pain of oil price shocks regardless of how much oil the United States imports. True energy security comes from using less, not just producing more.

Fourth, energy security risks extend beyond geopolitics and require investing adequately in domestic energy supply to meet changing circumstances. Today, grid operators and regulators are increasingly warning that the antiquated U.S. electricity system, already adjusting to handle rising levels of intermittent solar and wind energy, is not prepared for growing electricity demand from electric cars, data centers, and artificial intelligence. These reliability concerns were evident when an auction this summer set a price nine times higher than last year’s to be paid by the nation’s largest grid operator to power generators that ensure power will be available when needed. A reliable and affordable power system requires investments in grids as well as diverse energy resources, from cheap but intermittent renewables to storage to on-demand power plants.

Fifth, expanding clean energy sectors in the rest of the world is in the national interest because doing so creates economic opportunities for U.S. firms, diversifies global energy supply chains away from China, and enhances U.S. soft power in rapidly growing economies. (In much the same way, the Marshall Plan not only rebuilt a war-ravaged Europe but also advanced U.S. economic interests, countered Soviet influence, and helped U.S. businesses.) Doing so is especially important in rising so-called middle powers, such as Brazil, India, or Saudi Arabia, that are intent on keeping their diplomatic options open and aligning with the United States or China as it suits them transactionally.

To prevent China from becoming a superpower in rapidly growing clean energy sectors, and thereby curbing the benefits the United States derives from being such a large oil and gas producer, your administration should increase investments in research and development for breakthrough clean energy technologies and boost domestic manufacturing of clean energy. Toward these ends, your administration should quickly finalize outstanding regulatory guidance to allow companies to access federal incentives. Your administration should also work with the other side of the aisle to provide the market with certainty that long-term tax incentives for clean energy deployment—which have bipartisan support and have already encouraged historic levels of private investment—will remain in place. Finally, your administration should work with Congress to counteract the unfair competitive advantage that nations such as China receive by manufacturing industrial products with higher greenhouse gas emissions. Such a carbon import tariff, as proposed with bipartisan support, should be paired with a domestic carbon fee to harmonize the policy with that of other nations—particularly the European Union’s planned carbon border adjustment mechanism.

Your ability to build a strong domestic industrial base in clean energy will be aided by sparking more domestic clean energy use. This is already growing quickly as market forces respond to rapidly falling costs. Increasing America’s ability to produce energy is also necessary to maintain electricity grid reliability and meet the growing needs of data centers and AI. To do so, your administration should prioritize making it easier to build energy infrastructure at scale, which today is the greatest barrier to boosting U.S. domestic energy production. On average, it takes more than a decade to build a new high-voltage transmission line in the United States, and the current backlog of renewable energy projects waiting to be connected to the power grid is twice as large as the electricity system itself. It takes almost two decades to bring a new mine online for the metals and minerals needed for clean energy products, such as lithium and copper.

The permitting reform bill recently negotiated by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso is a good place to start, but much more needs to be done to reform the nation’s permitting system—while respecting the need for sound environmental reviews and the rights of tribal communities. In addition, reforming the way utilities operate in the United States can increase the incentives that power companies have not just to build new infrastructure but to use existing infrastructure more efficiently. Such measures include deploying batteries to store renewable energy and rewiring old transmission lines with advanced conductors that can double the amount of power they move.

Grid reliability will also require more electricity from sources that are available at all times, known as firm power. Your administration should prioritize making it easier to construct power plants with advanced nuclear technology—which reduce costs, waste, and safety concerns—and to produce nuclear power plant fuel in the United States. Doing so also benefits U.S. national security, as Russia is building more than one-third of new nuclear reactors around the world to bolster its geostrategic influence. While Russia has been the leading exporter of reactors, China has by far the most reactors under construction at home and is thus poised to play an even bigger role in the international market going forward. The United States also currently imports roughly one-fifth of its enriched uranium from Russia. To counter this by building a stronger domestic nuclear industry, your administration should improve the licensing and approval process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and reform the country’s nuclear waste management policies. In addition to nuclear power, your administration should also make it easier to permit geothermal power plants, which today can play a much larger role in meeting the nation’s energy needs thanks to recent innovations using technology advanced by the oil and gas sector for shale development.

Even with progress on all these challenges, it is unrealistic to expect that the United States can produce all the clean energy products it needs domestically. It will take many years to diminish China’s lead in critical mineral supply, battery manufacturing, and solar manufacturing. The rate of growth needed in clean energy is too overwhelming, and China’s head start is too great to diversify supply chains away from it if the United States relies solely on domestic manufacturing or that of a few friendly countries. As a result, diminishing China’s dominant position requires that your administration expand economic cooperation and trade partnerships with a vast number of other nations. Contrary to today’s protectionist trends, the best antidote to concerns about China’s clean technology dominance is more trade, not less.

Your administration should also strengthen existing tools that increase the supply of clean energy products in emerging and developing economies in order to diversify supply chains and counter China’s influence in these markets. For example, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC) can be a powerful tool to support U.S. investment overseas, such as in African or Latin American projects to mine, refine, and process critical minerals. As DFC comes up for reauthorization next year, you should work with Congress to provide DFC with more resources and also change the way federal budgeting rules account for equity investments; this would allow DFC to make far more equity investments even with its existing funding. Your administration can also use DFC to encourage private investment in energy projects in emerging and developing economies by reducing the risk investors face from fluctuations in local currency that can significantly limit their returns or discourage their investment from the start. The U.S. Export-Import Bank is another tool to support the export of U.S. clean tech by providing financing for U.S. goods and services competing with foreign firms abroad.

Despite this country’s deep divisions and polarization, leaders of both parties should agree that bolstering clean energy production in the United States and in a broad range of partner countries around the world is in America’s economic and security interests.

I wish you much success in this work, which will also be the country’s success.

[pb-dot]

Precursors

Something a bit outside of my usual oeuvre today, everyone. I decided to expand my vacation to my work on Thereafter, but since I know better than trying to stop writing cold turkey, I decided to explore some ideas in short story form. As I happened to have The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher rolling around in my brain at the time, it ended up being a bit of a Sci-Fi take on some of the ideas there, combined with some miscellaneous worldbuilding ideas that I had bouncing around in my brain at the same time. So, without further ado let me introduce a tale of ancient knowledge and the consequences thereof.

The ship shuddered and whined as we exited FTL, giving every impression classical physics was what governed our sudden deacceleration. It was, however, an illusion born of an FTL drive with several cheap and borderline illegal aftermarket tune-ups. I tried to not think about the complex math horribly mangled by second-hand magnet shrouds and gravitic sensors as I compensated for the FTL drift through a complex and furiously fast series of sensor adjustments that to the uninitiated looked like I was precisely calibrating something and not playing chicken with physics while playing a free jazz solo on an unwilling instrument.

"Is it supposed to sound like that, Cooke?" My passenger inquired.

"This one is," I lie as I bring us back to regular space. "It's a custom job, which is part of the reason why my prices are very reasonable."

"That they are," Their Anglo was pretty good, hardly a trace of an accent. Not all of the citizens of the PLN are as fluent in the old colonizer language, but then again, my Ta Reo isn't great so who was I to judge?

I allow myself a brief peak at the strange brew I had picked up at the borders of UA space. They went by Whetu, and whatever else you could say about them, they certainly were beautiful. The tight topknot of luxuriously wavy black hair, the faintly browned skin that so many in the Pan-Pacific League of Nations had kept, even as generations in the black had robbed them of natural sunlight in the quantities one could expect in the bottom of our native gravity well. All of this was well and good, but their eyes, I swear on the soul within I could stare into the damn things for days. There was a deep dark brown to them, so dark they were almost, but not quite, black. They felt magnetic, like the precipice of a surely lethal fall.

Not that it mattered. They were a client, and clients were clients first and gorgeous mysterious strangers second. I could make a fool of myself by mooning over them once the job was done.

"So, I hope you don't mind me asking," I say, professionalism be damned, I had to know a bit about them.

"Hm?" They appeared distracted, spellbound by the sight of the solar system that was spreading out in front of us. Me, I had seen it all before. Not this one in particular, mind, but once you've seen your first few hundred systems, they all start to blend together.

"What's down here that's worth charting a clipper all by your lonesome?" I nodded at the solar vista ahead where our destination, a gas giant's toxic-green moon, hung in contrast to its large red primary. Now that we were too close to the star for FTL there was nothing much to do while the navigation drives brought us towards our destination.

"Precursors." My passenger volunteered.

"Ah," I said. "You're a xenoarcheologist then? Jumping on an unlicensed Clipper to go digging in the sand for ancient drive casing shards?"

"Oh, this is bigger than that."

"M-hm." I intoned. This wasn't my first starry-eyed ruin diver, but I will admit there was a resolve to their words that made me file away the possibility of them not being full of hot air for later.

"Much bigger. There haven't been any boots on the scene yet, but the catbots have been at it for months."

"Months? Is it a whole building or something?"

"Think bigger taku hoa, it's a whole damn facility."

I whistle at this. "Oh, so this is going to be one of those multi-cycle jobs then?"

"Might not get the chance, the whole damn thing is active."

"You're sharding me,"

"Not even a little bit. The prelim scans are unambiguous, there's mining done, deposing of waste rock too by the look of it."

"Shit," I say, finding myself adjusting a few parameters on my dashboard that don't matter just to not stare slack-jawed. "You think there's any… survivors?"

"Oh stars and routes, no, I should think not. It's probably automated, but still, if it's still running after all these years, there might even be some infrastructure left."

We sat in silence as the jade pearl that was our destination grew larger in the viewport. The scattered clues of a now-extinct alien race whose technology vastly outranked even our theoretical science was one of those things humanity had just gotten kind of used to. This was something else though. Knowing Gilgamesh and Enkidu probably existed in late prehistory was one thing, but finding their dirty laundry scattered about was something else entirely.

"This is huge," I say after a while.

"It is, potentially," They said.

"Might want to invest in some muscle in case you're not the only one to find it."

"Oh, you offering?"

"I am, are you taking?"

Whetu gave me an appraising glance, and try as I might I couldn't help but blush. My habitual presence in zero-G had made me quite the beanpole, and try as I might, it was beyond both my ability and budget to build meaningful muscle on a diet of home-printed nutrition bars. In short, I look like a scrawny pushover, no matter how much I liked to portray myself as a scrappy spacer.

"I can't promise you much action," Whetu said, "but if you want to tag along…"

Touching down on the moon in question wasn't particularly dramatic as these things went, although a panel or two of insulated plating did disintegrate under the heat of entry. Considering the physics involved, it wasn't more than could be expected. Once the doors of my lander creaked open to reveal the green fog and rocky surface of the aptly named moon AX-3882 vii b, I was starting to feel like this had been a mistake. That said, Whetu seemed undaunted, or at least not sufficiently daunted to show body language through the fortifying presence of the vac suit, and so I could not find it in myself to be any more of a craven.

Whetu had brimmed with excitement as I went about the business of parking us in orbit and prepping the fall craft. For me it was routine, and it didn't much spice it up that we were heading into what was potentially a robot factory built by god. Granted, I was nervous as a cat in a rocking horse factory, but that didn't change how boring the procedures were. Loading up my piddly materiel chest with what shield packs and bolt guns I could get for a song and a prayer was admittedly less routine, but there's nothing like fastening straps on plasteel containers to suck the danger and adventure out of everything.

"How's the air down there?"

"Nitrogen and oxygen mostly, it's earthlike, but there's some nasty exotics in there, we'll need rebreathers and goggles for sure."

"Might as well go for full vac suits then?"

"If you have them I don't mind the extra protection."

"Only the best for my unlicensed xenoarcheologist," I jest as I step aside to reveal the exoskeleton zero-G vac loading suits I bought off a bankrupt shipping startup.

"Oh that's some Verhoeven-looking hardware, sure you got licenses for those bad boys?"

"Of course," I scoff. "Forged it myself. Only the best."

The trek from the landing craft passed without much ado. Whatever the precursors needed this planet for, they had not developed it to any meaningful degree outside of the site. Perhaps they had not needed to, and whatever significance this planet held to them was inherent to it. Then again, there were signs of mining of some sort, so the resources of its crust couldn't be entirely irrelevant.

"It should be just over that ridge over there," Whetu motioned with a clumsy mechanized arm.

"Alright boss. Should I arm up?"

Whetu conferred with the digital multitool on their arm. "No need for now," they reasoned. "No other life signs in the area, so provided the facility isn't dangerous we're probably safe."

"That's a big thing to take on faith."

"If you consider violence and danger to be the base state of the universe, I suppose." Whetu didn't quite shrug, but the motion was inherent to their tone. It was a common refrain from PLN folk, that the universe was a kind place if you allowed it to be. A historian once told me it was an attitude that arose from the relatively peaceful nature of the Liberation and Unifications of the PLN. The clean break from the systems of exploitation that the Terra Communis agreement had followed the PLN out into the Black and largely fueled their off-world expansions both economically and spiritually. I suppose one could do worse, but you only needed to be on cleanup duty for one core meltdown salvage job before certain questions about the inherent goodness of existence did arise quite naturally.

The facility didn't seem like that big of a deal from the outside, had I not been informed of the significance of the dull silo, I'd assumed it to be some abandoned well-rat strip-mining site. Imbued now as it was with ancient relevance though, it was hard to not think of it as an obelisk to long-forgotten gods. As we drew nearer, I could see the ribbed tunnels that emerged like tubes from the base of the structure and into the ground.

"Perhaps," I say, no need to relitigate a philosophical argument older than either of us after all. "I'd rather be safe than sorry is all."

As we approached the silo, it felt less and less appropriate to call it a silo. I wasn't sure if it was strictly contextual, or if there truly was some strange aura that made the construction take up more space than it did. No, I decided this definitely wasn't just my imagination, whether by some alien trick of architecture or spooky ancient radiation, there was a profound feeling of wrong to the building. We shouldn't be here. This isn't for us. This place is not a place of honor.

"We assume those are part of an integrated mining hub of some kind," Whetu volunteered. "The little we know about them, the precursors, tells us they considered single-use buildings to be… uh… tasteless, or wrong, there's some ambiguity in our translations there."

"Huh," was all I could say.

"It's really exciting, trying to piece together history without any first-hand accounts. Kore, hadn't it been for the Proxima find we wouldn't even have the language."

"Some would say that's more maddening and frustrating."

"What it is you Anglos say? Potato-Tomato."

"Potato-Poh-tato, it's referencing some pre-exodus language thing I think. Never made no sense to me."

We enter all the same through one of the ribbed tubes. How Whetu decided that this one in particular was not used for active mining and would be safe to enter, I have no idea, but I did not ask. If nothing else, because hearing that they did not know and merely gambled on it would have me running for the hills.

The tube was about a person and a half tall, and as a perfect circle, it was equally as wide. As we entered the oddly organic-looking structure, I could not help but notice the strangeness. To my untrained eyes, it looked like the tunnel dug through the ground as well as the wall, leaving nary a trace indicating the change in material hardness. Either a lot of work had been done to even it out, or precursor methods of making tunnels were as strange as the rest of their tech. The slope upward was noticeable, but thankfully not too steep. We climbed in silence for a while, the whir of our servos almost but not quite syncing up in that maddening way that breaths sometimes do.

I expected the tunnel to end, to open up into what I considered the rooms of a building to look. What we instead discover as we reach of the zenith of the tunnel, was nothing of the sort.

There was a widening into some sort of chamber, yes, but it was way more organic than anything a human would do. The ribbed walls expanded more abruptly than they would into a natural cave, so there was no mistaking it for a distinct chamber. This bulbous space was mostly empty, apart from small, orderly piles of rocks, ore fragments I came to realize.

The Android Revolution had failed to materialize, as engineers and designers discovered that while Man was, indeed, a piece of work, the anthromorph form was not a particularly effective one for a machine to have. Together with the disappointing non-start of sapient AI running into much the same problem in data structure form, humans had, however reluctantly, shed the dream of forming machines into our own image. The precursors it would seem, had come to a similar conclusion.

"The first chamber is usually empty according to the bots," Whetu explained without being prompted. "If there's actually anything still working here we'll have to go deeper."

"Of course," I found myself saying. "and if we're looking for any tech we'll have to go to the very center I suppose?"

"Not necessarily," Whetu said, it sounded like they did not consider my observation rude, but that was surely a failure of their comprehension. "The precursors were big on decentralized layouts. Come on, let's check it out." They motioned for the point where the bulb yet again constricted into a steep but climbable tunnel wall.

We had passed a handful of mostly empty chambers when we saw the first of them.

The machine creatures, for it was impossible to not call them creatures as they moved in a creature-way, albeit with the mechanical precision and purpose of a machine, reminded me first and foremost of an enormous earthworm or other anelid. Its long segmented body was constructed of a light metal or metal-looking substance, approximately four or five meters in length. The body coiled and wrapped around itself to support a broken column as what one might consider the head of the worm slid open to reveal a plethora of tools. Whetu and I both watched, transfixed, as the worm-bot started welding the column back into place. The column was not supposed to be load-bearing, as the spherical ribbed cave seemed to bear its own weight beautifully. The exact purpose of the column, though, became clear once the worm finished its work and started coiling its way up the freshly restored column toward a hole at the apex of the ceiling.

"Amazing," Whetu said, I couldn't help but nod, even though the stiffness of the exosuit swallowed the entire gesture.

"I guess the worms run the show huh? Do you want to try getting a closer look at one?"

"No," Whetu said. "It's better to just observe their functionality in the wild, the catbots have taken some close-up captures anyway. We need to go deeper."

And so we did. Every new chamber showed more complex movement from the metal worms. In one room, a larger model moved to devour the small pieces of ore rock, leaving behind, for the lack of a better word, droppings of smelted ingots for its smaller brethren to collect. We ascend, and as we do, it becomes clear that the pearl string of connected rooms spirals upward, the holes in the ceiling tunneling to the next hole in the spiral above. It's a nonsensical design to me, as a human, but given the flexibility it offers the mech worms, it makes somewhat more sense.

"It's weird," I find myself opining.

"Hm?"

"So far we've not really seen this facility doing anything."

"How do you figure?"

"It's all repairs and maintenance," I gesture towards the worm inching up the curved room wall with multiple metal ingots stuck in its metal skin, like magnetic studs on an earth caterpillar. "That boy over there is taking that metal from the digesting room, and we saw the welder down there use the ingots as…super-solder I guess? Either way, we haven't seen anything about what this whole thing is for I think. It's weird."

Whetu remained silent for a while, from the flickering of their digitool projection on the inside of the vac suit helmet I could tell they were going through the data by the survey bots.

"You appear to be right," they said at last.

"The catbot surveyors haven't been much deeper than this yet, though, there may be a chewy center to this place for us to find."

"I hope so," I found myself saying, and to my surprise it was true. There just was something deeply unconscionable to me about these automatons going on forever for the sake of it.

There were fewer and fewer of what I'd designated "digesting rooms" as we climbed higher. In its place, are construction bays. Rooms with plentiful scaffoldings where the welder worms worked on, as best as I could see, repairing or creating new units.

The oddest thing about the Chamber was how it wasn't the least bit spherical. The tunnel opened up suddenly to a flat floor. The puck-shaped chamber was approximately the size of the tower's base, and so I came to understand it as its center. Along the outer walls, wall reliefs, statuesque representations of vaguely humanoid forms, their faces, if they'd had any, worn away by time.

For an uncannily long time, all we could see were robots repairing robots, robots building robots, every bit as mindless as the humble earthworms they so resembled until we came across the Chamber.

"This is it," Whetu said, equal amounts awe and enthusiasm in their voice. "This is what I've been looking for!" They set down the plasteel container they had been lugging around, revealing it to be a mini drone hub, as sphere-shaped documentation drones started whirring about the second the case opened. "There should be a terminal around here somewhere."

The center of the chamber was a column of strange metal and glass constructions I came to understand as machines of some sort. Light pulsated through the glass tubes and rods, causing sheet metal to ring with tones that may or may not be part of normal operation. Whetu approached it with the light steps one might approach an altar or a very scared dog that might bite. What they were looking for, I had no idea, and as to distract myself from the shapeless uncertainty that started to take root in me, I found myself inspecting the decoration along the outer walls.

"The field of Digi-Archeology is pretty fresh," Whetu said from somewhere behind me.

"Mhm?"

"But we've been working on a way to access and interpret precursor databanks… this is my first field test with the thing so I'm pretty excited about it as you can imagine."

I found myself transfixed by the wall statues. If this was how the precursors looked, they certainly wouldn't win any contemporary beauty contest. Their limbs were long and strange, seeming to fit poorly with their solid cylindrical torsos and flexible, seemingly boneless, bulb-heads. Maybe their faces, if they'd had any, tied it all together, but I couldn't but regard them as a blobby mess.

"Ok, yes, we have contact. I'm going to try to access the log function if there is one, and see if we can find out what this whole place is for.

"Sure," I said. Somewhere behind me, Whetu's digitool projected a screen where streams of odd symbols, I had to assume the alien language, was annotated by globs of text, the best suggestion of a translation if I had to guess, but I did not dwell on them, my brain demanded I instead pay attention to the statues.

"Ok, yes, here they are… hmm, this is less than helpful, this whole place's history starts at… 0? I'm guessing it counts local history from the point of construction which… isn't how I'd do it but ok. I can't access the last bit of the log, or even tell how long it is, it's a bit unclear if that's a bug or corruption or some write-only read-only interference or what"

It was difficult to say for sure, but it felt like the statues were made to look like the precursor subjects were covered by a blanket or fabric of some kind like the true masters of marble sculpture back on Earth would on occasion depict their subjects covered by sheer sheets of silk. There was an imprecision to their form that had me equal parts repulsed and fascinated.

"The entire facility is set up to be self-sustaining, extracting material to replicate the bots that keep it running… and these machines, yes. Wait… yes, this includes their databanks, they're built from silica and ferrous material at a set interval now this IS fascinating, the saved data is built into the new digital machines, no file transfer necessary. It's not PERFECT replication, but close… wait, that's an idea."

"Huh?" I found myself staring at one statue in particular. There was something defensive to its posture. Even though its long limbs were at what a human would call a resting position at it's side, its shoulders, and upper torso were twisted in what might seem as an avoidant way.

"If I can find the rough error rate and this system has some way of diagnosing it's data corruption level, I could figure out how many cycles it has been since Year 0… let's see, oh yeah, they use Base12 don't they… hmm, the digital stuff lasts the longest it seems, they construct new replacements every… uh, time units convert at a rate of…." Whetu descended into mumbling, only to perk up at "103 thousand years or so? Stars above they build these things to last and there's… uh.. approximately… fucking base12… an error rate of 0,05% over that lifetime? That's pretty good I guess."

"Beats me," I say, I'm no longer paying attention. What is it about this statue? Is it how it looks like it's desperate to escape its statue-ness like it's struggling against its calcified skin, like some gorgon's curse has trapped it in stone forevermore.

"oh… oh wow. To ten decimals, 0% guaranteed uncorrupted data is left… no, 20 decimals? What the hell, how many cycles has this gone on?"

"Huh," I say again, I'm not listening, Whetu has to know I'm not listening and yet they keep on like they are every bit as transfixed by their investigation as I am to mine. Something bright catches my attention. Something along the edges of the ghoulish relief glints with fae mischief in the dimness of the room.

"Over 106 thousand cycles? That can't be right because that would mean…"

These weren't statues. These weren't art, I realize as my eyes run over what I had believed to be a rounded frame. Now I see what looks like ancient crumbling rubber, or some other flexible sealant on the translucent glass-like covers.

I say nothing. The source of the glinting was not a diode as I had initially assumed, it was reflective. If it wasn't glass, it was a similar substance. The little shard of glass or not-glass stood out like a hook, still sharp after whatever violence broke off the rest of it. The rest of it. I realized there'd have to be more, a whole glass shroud or…

The realization sets in like nausea, and I can't help but step back, aghast at the horror of it.

These had been pods, meant to contain living things. Cryostasis or some other way of preserving the living flesh through the ravages of uncaring time, I guessed. The pods had failed, maybe before the glass coverings were shattered, maybe as they shattered, or even after, and whatever fate slated to claim the precursor's biology had inevitably set in. They did not decompose it seemed. If anything, they calcified, turning into fossilized versions of themselves. Maybe whatever made up their faces or features rotted off or turned brittle and crumpled, leaving them as the ill-shaped parodies of life that they now inhabited. Perhaps even the tower we explored was made out of their own dead, fused in death into solid blocks, hollowed out by their anelidic mechanical servants like base cement.

The shrill sound made my world swim in sudden vertigo. I had not seen the mechanical worm enter the room, nor had I caught it moving, but now it clung to, and coiled defensively over the "statue" I had drawn my gun on. The worm's head was retracted, and the aggressively blinking light and strange tools that faced me immediately brought to mind readied weapons, not helped one bit by the undulating sway of the worm's body, moving as a snake poised to strike. It must have been the worm or one of its comrades in arms that had produced the sound, a sonic assault of some kind.

"Unless my math is way off," Whetu's voice shook with the implications "This tower is over 14 billion years old. That's… That's older than the universe… older than we assume the universe to be."

I did not listen. The words entered my conscious mind, but there was no one at home. I found myself drawing my bolter. It wasn't in fear, as much as it was in a deep revulsion or pity, if there truly was a way to delineate between those two emotions in my mind, I certainly couldn't make the distinction. I needed to destroy these remains, to uncage these alien souls from their mineral prisons, to shatter these before-comers and tell the universe in no certain terms that their age was over. Whether by natural process, conquest or self-genocide their time was over, and the grasp of time could not be denied.

Once I stepped back and lowered my weapon, the worm lowered its head, mirroring the gesture, but it did not slink away, nor turn its faceless attention away from me. I had, apparently, been reclassified from Mostly Harmless to Probably Bad News. In the distance, I could hear the metallic sound of more segmented bodies moving, the sounds grew louder.

As we ran, I realized the hopelessness of the situation. If the worms were operated by a centralized intelligence, or at least a decentralized one with the ability to communicate with its compatriots, we could potentially be met with a small army of worm-bots below. Even if they didn't have any dedicated weapons like I had assumed, their welding torches alone could char us down to the bone, and the way the worm used its coils to move heavy beams like it was nothing told me that tearing us limb from limb wasn't off the menu either.

"We need to get out of here," I said. It was possible the worms would not lump Whetu in with me in their threat assessment, but I, for one, did not want to take the chance. I seized Whetu's hand. "Whetu! We got to get out of here." I yanked on their hand, praying that this would drag them along. If Whetu activated the vac suit exoskeleton nothing short of a bulldozer would get them out of this room without their express and ongoing consent, and while I doubted the worms could do it either, their attempts might be considerably more violent, and the suit's shear and tear strength would not be sufficient no matter how strong it got.

Neither one of us said anything as we boarded the fall craft and prepared for the kick. Escaping a gravity well is inherently riskier than returning to one, and while it shook the fight out of us and then some, I felt safer in the shaky grasp of the Fall craft's takeoff engines than I did on the compact rocky soil of the moon. The blessed calm of zero-G came as a soothing balm after the tribulations of takeoff, but not even the tranquility of the Black could erase what we had experienced.

Fortunately, it seemed the worms were content with getting out of our way, although more than one of their rounded, sightless not-heads followed our hastened retreat down from the puck chamber and out of the ribbed tunnel. They would act if we at any point stopped leaving, my terrified fight or flight instinct informed me in jagged pulses of adrenaline. We weren't safe before we were out, ideally off planet, ideally on our way out of the star system fastways.

We ran down the hill we had crested on our way there. I felt like it had been years, like an entire life had taken place between our crossing of this natural threshold into the impossible and unnatural, and us emerging like bedraggled Orpheuses now, in the low twilight of the moon's setting sun.

For the longest time, Whetu gave no answer, nor any indication that they had heard me. They had stopped moving around aimlessly and sat by my side at the bridge viewport. Once I had been careful about letting my passengers to the bridge, mostly because I didn't like to be seen struggling with the instruments. I had conquered that, though. If anything, my virtuoso handling of my rustbucket ship was something to be proud of.

We were both out of our vac suits and ambling like lost souls around in my cramped clipper before either one of us said a word.

"Do you want to return to Neo Wellington?" I asked. It was such a ludicrous thing to ask after all we've seen, but whether we had upended humanity's understanding of the universe or not, at some point I had to chart a course somewhere. If my feelings on where we were headed were true, that it truly didn't matter, I needed someone else to make the call. "Or do you want to go somewhere else?"

"Kapiti Ano," Whetu said at last. "I have some colleagues in Kapiti Ano, they should hear about this."

I whistled. "Oh, that's deep in NPL territory. You got your papers in order?"

"Of course," Whetu said absent-mindedly. "Will getting there be a problem for you?"

The truth was, I was happy to go to a foreign port. It postponed the question of what I was going to do with myself. Whether I'd continue to be a well-hopping freelancer, or if this knowledge the universe had burdened me with needed to go somewhere, to do something with something. If I'm able to forget, I'd take it, but there was a portentous voice in my head that told me that oblivion would not claim me, no matter how many bottles or tabs I went through looking for it.

"Oh no, I have all the permits. Forged 'em myself." If Whetu picked up on my little joke, they made no sign of it.

The universe was always massive in a way the human brain couldn't fully comprehend, ruled by forces both infinitely vaster and more infinitesimal than my puny comprehension. If such a little speck could find an ounce of truth in this massive existence, that had not changed one bit with our revelations, even in their incomprehensible knowledge and skill, the precursors had ultimately perished. The universe, for all the chaos and difficulty and incomprehensibility, was constant and persistent in contrast. And so, I figured, all I could do was to persist, and persist I would.

I engaged the FTL drive and started the preparation for a jump. The universe was vast and incomprehensible around my little ship, but that's not new.

[criophorus]

Will Do Readings For Food

Emergency readings are open!

Starting as low as $7!

I hate to complain when I know so many of us are tight on cash, and I always try to stay grateful for what I've got! But I got laid off yesterday morning and have about $15 to my name. Rent is due, I've had to had repairs done on my car 3 times in 3 weeks, and so far I haven't been able to book an interview anywhere. My partner and I were barely scraping by as it were, so we could really use a little help if you're lookin for a reading!

For those of you it may be important to, I'm nonbinary and have a mood disorder, dissociative disorder, ADHD, and chronic pain!!

Primarily opening Lenormand readings (similar to tarot, read in pairs, for anyone wondering!), but will happily do tarot or oracle readings, scry, make sigils, read natal charts, or any other services I've provided here in the past, just ask! I'm more than happy to talk about bundle deals for buying multiple readings or multiple of the above, I'm open to spreads not listed below– in sum, if you don't see what you're looking for, just ask!!

Payment over P*ypal preferred, over v*nmo if, for any reason, you can't use P*ypal.

D*NATIONS WELCOME & SO APPRECIATED! My V*nmo is @alexrayne

Readings Prices and Proof of Destitution Below the Cut!

LENORMAND READINGS - PRICES

3-Card Spread - $7 - Includes the spread read as a whole ("sentence-style"), interpretation of both sets of horizontal pairs and the mirrored pair as well as the overall summary of my interpretation at the end. That's 4 separate aspects from which I will interpret the answer your question, plus a cohesive interpretation of what they mean altogether, and a huge thank you for paying for gas to get my partner to work in the morning!

5-Card Spread - $12 - Read as a whole, all 4 horizontal pairs, both mirrored pairs, and summary. That's 7 whole aspects of interpretation before your summary, and you've helped me eat for the day!

9-Card Spread, simplified - $15 - Interpretation of center card (core/theme), each horizontal row as a whole (conscious, concrete, and sub/unconscious details), each vertical row as a whole (past, present, and future details), and summary. 7 aspects of interpretation + summary!

9-Card Spread, full breakdown - $35 - Interpretation of the center card, corners/diagonals (context - influence and possibility), each horizontal row as a whole and broken down into pairs and mirrors for more details, and each vertical row as a whole and broken down into pairs and mirrors. That's a whopping 27 aspects of interpretation I'll detail to you before putting it all together and giving you my final, detailed answer! Expect THREE PAGES OF DETAILS on this one! Recommended for when you want a reading on broad areas of your life (ex. "I want on my bf's and I's relationship" or "It's been a long week, I'd like a reading to get some overall insight right now," or a question you want to really deep dive, like "What should I expect at the party tonight," or, "I'm making x decision and need insight on what to do.") Only taking 3 full-breakdown 9-card spread requests at a time so I can get to everyone in a timely fashion! Slots available: (3/3)

RULES

To order a reading, DM me or email me at alexrayne.poetry@gmail.com

No medical/legal questions.

Must be 18+ or have parent's permission, honor system

Readings under $35 - payment when reading is done, before I send full document

Readings $35 and up - half up front, half when reading is done

PROOF

Thank you for reading, and I appreciate every reblog! <3 Love y'all!

[darkmaga-returns]

By Joan Swirsky

It was exactly 1:38 A.M. today that Bret Baier on Fox News said that it was clear “that the next president of the United States of America would be Donald J. Trump.”

Not taking a micrometer of credit away from President Trump 47 and his epically tireless, passionate, often hilariously funny, and brave — in spite of three assassination attempts and then a fourth death threat  —  countrywide, night-after-night, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after-year campaign.

Whoever coined the word “superhuman” had a person like Trump in mind!

But I have to give the lion’s share of the credit for President Trump’s decisive, stunning, overwhelming, crushing, thunderous victory to the historically astute, paying-attention, loving-our-country American public.

When you think about it, it is really so understandable.

For the past four years, hardworking Americans resented spending their 8-10-12-14-hour days — more if they have two jobs — working their butts off, only to have their taxes and food prices and gas prices and regulations raised, and crime off the charts, and for what?

To send upward of $175 billion to the Zelensky grifter in Ukraine so he can buy yet another villa and another yacht?

To send not millions, but billions of their hard-earned tax dollars to the murderous, Jew-hating, Israel-loathing jihadist mullahs in Iran so they can put their, ahem, leaders up in decadently luxurious hotels in Qatar?

And, since October 7, 2023, to send more than a billion dollars to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians...you know, the cheerleaders of the serial murderers known as Hamas and Hezb’allah?

It’s Not Only the Money

Surprise, surprise!  American voters have both eyes and ears.

[mayakern]

Loved the countdown on the new items! It was so satisfying seeing that go and then refreshing the page lol. Also loved the extra big font size guide, environmental storytelling at its finest

(Also very happy to snag 3 tops and a miniskirt at light speed!)

LOL thank you!! i hope u love the shirts and skirt!

there are always going to be people who won’t bother reading a size chart, but my hope is to minimize that as much as possible since facilitating returns is both expensive and wasteful (gas prices etc), so anything we can reasonably do to decrease the amount of necessary returns is super helpful to us.

[byemambo]

24th Birthday Special: Advice from a Concert Connoisseur

I wanted to post something in commemoration for my birthday (Aug 3) and why not talk about my personal takes on what you can do to enjoy your future concert experiences! Of course, everyone will approach concerts differently, so this is obviously a list particular and true to me, but could possibly have information that can enlighten others to try the next time they go to a concert. Although I've been to other concerts of varying genres, this listen will cover mainly how kpop tours go and what to expect.

1) Venue and Ticketing Information

[THE BOYZ - 2024 ZENERATION / ATEEZ - 2019 THE EXPEDITION, both locations in Atlanta, GA]

First things first: collect all information and details about the tour and the concert itself. Depending on which touring/production companies are in charge of the tour, information such as venues, dates and cities, as well as pricing for tickets and merchandise will be more transparent and quickly distributed for the general interest group to prepare their finances and whatever accommodations they'll need if they plan on traveling. I would keep an eye out for the following:

Tour Name along with cities/countries: since companies use "world tour" as a marketing tactic, it's rarely considered a world tour by definition as many artists only touchdown in so many areas of the world within that span of time their tour goes for

The year and tour dates: most tours are announced months to even a year ahead of time, so be aware of when those announcements drop and establish the amount of time you have until that particular date arrives. This can be in a span of a few weeks to a span of a few months, which is highly dependent on the artist's current schedule (comebacks, festivals/major events, touring other parts of the world outside of where you reside, hiatuses, etc)

Who the touring/production company is: from experience, pay attention and do your own research in how that particular company conducts their tours. Some companies are well established and have years of experience in elevating the quality of their concerts, others are truthfully underprepared or unorganized, a few are actually scammers based on how they handle on site VIP tier perks/experiences. I would check Twitter for this type of information, especially if people have compiled their experiences through threads

Who is the ticket distributor: some production companies sell their tickets directly, others such as Ticketmaster or AXS are in charge of distributing those tickets. This is important for having access to your ticket information, venue seating charts, VIP tier list and perks

What is the venue and where is it located: some venues are placed in the heart of the major cities, which all have their own unique regulations and expectations (bag policies, parking, fanmade signs/posters, etc) Locating the venue will also help you narrow down housing accommodations a mode of transportation as some cities are more walkable than others

What are the different tiers/perks: each tour is conducted differently, so make sure you take the time to read what all the perks/benefits will be before deciding on purchasing your ticket! These benefits can include: hi-touch, send off, soundcheck, group photos, selfie opportunities, line up priority, etc! Depending on the size of the venue, these perks will differ in what's available with the prices reflecting so.

What time does ticket sales begin: because of time zones, pay attention to when ticket sales begin, as they will differ from presale (with codes if you've been a frequent attendee for that particular group/touring company, or membership benefits from the group itself), VIP, and general sale

2) Tiers and Seating Preferences

[VERIVERY - 2024 GO ON FAN MEETING / TWICE - 2023 Ready to Be, both in Atlanta, GA]

Depending on the venue size, there will be various ways to view the concert: in the pit/standing area, seated, or leveled/nosebleeds. Although I've had my fair share of purchasing VIP and being able to be closer to the stage, my preferences over the years have shifted, prioritizing my view of the stage versus how close I am to the stage.

This has heavily impacted my overall experience, as I'm someone who doesn't feel the need to record every single moment I'm there, lessening my pressure of wanting to capture the "perfect" moments and allow myself to enjoy the concert in its entirety. I also believe that there will always be videos and photos from other users online, so I use them as my way of archiving those memories

Of course we know what the pros would be in getting a higher tier ticket, but my cons are more important to me: standing/pit will give you an obscure view of the stage due to people (most likely) being in front of you, and how high they all plan on holding their phones up to record. Some fans will also hold up objects (fans, posters/signs, etc), which depending on where you're viewing the stage, that can also be distracting

My favorite areas to stand/sit now are usually centered and towards the back of the pit (near or behind the sound booth) or central seating sections

3) Experience the Concert

As I've been going to concerts, my first one being BTS's Highlight Tour back in 2015 (iykyk...), my approach to concerts have evolved over time:

Bring earplugs! These speakers and crowds can becoming extremely loud and over time with continuous exposure without proper protection, it will affect your hearing long term. I use Loop Earplugs (found on their website or Amazon) and I can still hear the performance/music but without risking my ears ringing after the concert is over

Be mindful of your battery life on your devices. This can be your lightsticks, phone, cameras, etc. You'll need your phone for after the concert, such as navigating back home, ordering Ubers/Lifts, ordering food, etc. Bring chargers, power banks, or extra batteries as appropriate

Dress however you like at the concert, but if you want to feel extra special: dress according to the artist's themed eras or your favorite member! Whether you dress for comfort or for fashion, most fandoms can be (not always but that shouldn't affect your individual experience) extremely friendly and supportive, so having a themed outfit that's recognizable will give you a confidence boost! I'm someone who doesn't bother to dress for every day, but for concerts, I enjoy theming my outfits and received compliments when I'm there :)

[THE BOYZ Juyeon - The Stealer]

If you ever want to make anyone's day: hand out freebies! This can be small bracelets, keychains, charms, unofficial photocards or posters, anything that you can commemorate the day with. I've made unofficial photocards in the past for ATEEZ, which give you a chance at potentially making friends or gaining exposure within the community (if you promote as a creative, artist, group order manager, fansite, etc) However, if you do plan on handing out freebies: you will come across solo stans or entitled people that will not be satisfied with not getting their favorite member so handle those situations as you best see fit (personally, I'd probably just deny them a freebie if they don't have a warm and approachable attitude from the jump)

Talk to people around you and make them feel welcomed and a part of the community: it can be as simple as holding the line for someone else to get their own freebies (this happened to me at the Expedition tour and I was able to spend the entire day with those group of girls), asking who someone's bias is and where they're traveling from, if someone shows signs of needing help with anything, extending a hand if you're able to do anything to resolve the situation, also if you end up sharing words with other people, wishing them a good night and to arrive to their next location safely! It may seem small and insignificant, but these moments can change the trajectory of someone's concert experience in a positive direction without you even realizing

Dance like no one's watching, but act appropriately to not become a nuisance to the group experience: be there to enjoy your time but not at the expense of everyone else's experience. There's room to be excited, but there's no room for disrespect and acting inappropriately: scream while everyone's invited to scream, be mindful of your bubble (I've had to confront people pushing into me before after dealing with it multiple times without an apology), let the artists have a moment to speak and share their thoughts with the audience (please don't use those ments to shout and try to grab someone's attention, especially for people like me that have auditory processing issues and can't always make out what's being said without repeating the statements), be a good sport to everyone around you, including the artists themselves. Just because you paid for the experience doesn't entitle to act unhinged

Experience the concert like a movie: there's excitement in the element of surprise. I usually refrain from looking for the setlists or fancams of previous stops before my stop, treating my concert experience like I'm watching a movie for the first time. Some groups will also play into the theatrics of the show itself with dance performances or stages outside of their promoted songs, even performing songs outside of their norms (such as Japanese releases) or pre released title songs (stream Bite Back - THE BOYZ everyone). Allow yourself to immerse within the environment: watch the VCRs, pay attention to the set design changes, be present in the moment where it's easy for people to fall back onto their phones when they're not be stimulated. Give kudos to all the moving parts that makes these shows spectacular and genuinely a once in a lifetime opportunity. Memorialize it, embody it, consume the energy that comes from everyone coming together and traveling far and wide to be in a shared space and experiencing a special moment that will never be replicated again. And don't forget to have fun and if possible, make fun for others as well! And do not fret if your attempts at conversing with people fall short: it's almost 9/10 nothing personal to you and doesn't actually have anything to do with you. Anything can happen within these 24 hours that can make or break someone's spirit, so don't take offense if people are there for reasons outside of your own. Some people are there to unwind and listen to their favorite music, others want to make friends, some want to get as many interactions with their faves as possible (which I have my own opinions about but it's not important), overall: despite what happens, find your silver linings to make do of what's happening and what's in your control. You are in control of your experience: no one else, so might as well make the most of it and share an equal responsibility with the artist to create fond memories for all of us to look back on with smiles and heavy hearts

Thank you for whoever made it this far: happy birthday to me! 🎂🧁🍰

[roo-bastmoon]

It's time to panic

Almost half this "fandom" is working against him right now. Deliberately trying to chart group songs instead of Like Crazy or organizing buying parties and streaming parties for a prerelease that hasn't dropped yet.

His own media is gunning for him already, trying to discredit his impact, and this is while he's at the top. This is just the START if we let him freefall. He's not even in the top 20 today. It's time to panic.

I cannot stress enough, everyone in the US who loves Jimin needs to pitch in just $3.80 more now. Price of a Starbucks, a gallon of gas, a 5lb bag of potatoes. If you need help then please reach out to funders who have gift cards at the ready for you! Making a new account and using a different payment method is not that big a deal, it takes minutes!! If you're maxed out, ask your friend to buy the 5 digitals on their iTunes and grab them a coffee next time you hang. There's so many work-arounds here!

I am not trying to be negative, because on the whole, BTS is a joyous and positive experience, but I can't lie, this is my mood right now, puppykitties:

You cannot tell me we're going to let Jimin down over $3.80 and being too lazy to make an extra email and store account. You cannot tell me that we will let our Jiminie take damage because folks are too proud to reach out to a funding account or too self-absorbed to make a new login. I'm absolutely not hearing it.

“In the middle of the road, in the moment you want to give up, shout out even louder: “So what?” 

[rjzimmerman]

In his Substack blog, Bill McKibben summarizes this article authored by Brian Deese (one my long-term friends) published in The Atlantic. Brian was President Biden's Director of theNational Economic Council and was a key drafter of the Inflation Reduction Act:

Total investment in clean energy was more than 70 percent higher in 2023 than in 2021, and now represents a larger share of U.S. domestic investment than oil and gas. Clean-energy manufacturing is off the charts. Money is disproportionately flowing into promising technologies that have yet to reach mass adoption, such as hydrogen, advanced geothermal, and carbon removal. And, thanks to a provision that allows companies to buy and sell the tax credits they generate, the law is creating an entirely new market for small developers.

But for all of this progress to deliver, it needs to translate into clean energy that Americans can actually use. In 2023, we added 32 gigawatts of clean electricity to the U.S. grid in the form of new solar, battery storage, wind, and nuclear. It was a record—but it was still only about two-thirds of what’s necessary to stay on track with the IRA’s goal of reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

Brian adds:

The topic of utility reform operates in what the climate writer David Roberts has described as a “force field of tedium.” I can say from experience that starting a cocktail-party conversation about public-utility-commission elections is a good way to find yourself standing alone. But if you care about averting the most apocalyptic consequences of climate change, you need to care about utilities.

A century ago, utilities were granted regional monopolies to sell electricity subject to a basic bargain. They could earn a profit by charging consumers for investments in building new power plants and transmission lines; in exchange, they’d commit to providing reliable electricity to all, and submit to regulation to make sure they followed through.

This model made sense for much of the 20th century, when generating electricity required building big, expensive fossil-fuel-powered steam turbines, and utilities needed to be assured of a healthy return on such heavy up-front investments. But it is at least a generation out of date. Over the past several decades, technology has opened up new ways of meeting consumers’ electricity demand. The 20th-century utility model doesn’t encourage this innovation. Instead, it defaults toward simply building more fossil-fuel-burning plants. As a result, consumers get a less reliable product at higher prices, and decarbonization takes a back seat.

[vibinwiththefrogs]

What's the Deal with Cotton?

For @rangerofthesouth , I don't work with cotton but we just went over all this in my field crop class and how we grow cotton feels very bizarre? Keep reading below for stuff on GMOs and cotton farming.

As far as I can tell cotton is probably one of the most technology-intensive crops we grow in the US. Not necessarily physical technology as in equipment, but gene technology (GMOs), breeding, and chemical use. It has all the standard things used on it that other industrial row crops have, such as herbicides, fertilizers, and pesticides. But it also has GMO traits and needs to be treated with plant growth regulators (PGRs), and defoliant before harvest.

So it turns out, cotton is a perennial plant. So if the weather is right it will just keep growing into something of a bush/tree sort of thing. But when grown as a crop they get treated with PGRs to slow/stop vegetative growth and to trigger reproductive growth (aka, the flowers that form into cotton bolls). Link to a picture of a guy with cotton not treated with PGRs on time below.

There's multiple kinds of GMOs. The big ones are traits added for herbicide/chemical resistance in the plant (such as Roundup Ready), and then there's pest resistance which usually is the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) trait. Bt is a bacteria that will infect insects if they feed on the plant, killing them off or deterring them. As far as I'm aware the big GMO crops in the US are soybeans, corn, and cotton; As well please note cotton production is very different across the world, I'm strictly speaking about the US.

What kind of crazy about pest resistant GMOs though, is it was touted around as an end to pesticides for a while. There was a quote I heard somewhere though that goes something like "if you're in a war and you have weaponry but the other side has evolution, the other side is going to win". Basically, insects started developing a resistance to Bt. And so different types of Bt traits keep getting stacked on one another to keep it effective, and currently we're up to 3 stacked Bt traits (see chart below, its from my class lol). Only the upper most trait on this chart is still effective, the others aren't.

What's nuts about this, is that cotton farmers are paying for every stacked gene even if they're ineffective. According to my prof a bag of conventional untreated cotton seed is ~$100, while GMO cotton is ~$600 a bag. The price of cotton off the field is really bad too, as far as I last heard its $0.70/1 lb. There's more numbers than this but as you can imagine with chemical applications, gas for equipment, and fertilizer, its looking not profitable. And so the US cotton industry is hella subsidized and there's so many government programs to keep it alive because many farmers cannot survive growing cotton without the subsidies.

I don't know a whole lot other than this because I've only just begun looking at cotton, but here's some questions and things I'm thinking about. First, clearly we need a whole system change because everything conventional ag brings out to stop the pests and weeds causes resistance development; chemicals and genes are helpful technologies, but only when used carefully within other non-chemical pest management strategies. We're currently deepening a major environmental and agricultural crisis with ag chemical usage. Second, I really want to look more into the legal side of things with government crop subsidies and insurance because it really seems to be the core things propping up all this for multiple crops (corn and soybeans included). And then, what would cotton look like in an alternative agricultural system? Personally I've only ever seen it as a conventional row crop.

[dollarbin]

Dollar Bin #39:

Willie Nelson & Roger Miller's Old Friends

Willie Nelson put out records in the early 80's with the same feverish regularity with which I pass gas. Every few minutes he'd rip off another album, which raises all kinds of red flags about their quality. Did anyone sniff this stuff before it wafted out of him or did he just saturate the radio waves with flatulence, transforming his discography into something akin to the 6am environment under my bedsheet?

This record from 82 looked especially unpromising in the Dollar Bin last week, even for that era. But I bought it anyway; I'm a sucker for Willie and for Roger Miller too. Even so, before I drop the needle for the first time, let's count the concerns:

It's a Buddy Record. Nelson had a lot of buddies in the 80's, all of them fairly washed up 60's country artists who were only too happy to team up for a single afternoon and record an entire album with Steam Train Willie in the hopes of reviving their careers. Indeed, there are so many Willie Buddy Records that I wouldn't be surprised if he recorded one with My Buddy, the 80's doll sensation. Maybe that's Willie singing the theme song!

My famous brother surely craved one of these creepy toys as a child. I'll bet he's cuddling with one as we speak...

But back to why this album looks suspect:

Old Friends does not even merit its own page on Wikipedia. Everything merits a page on Wikipedia. My farts surely have individualized entrees. Speaking of which, it's time to squeeze off another one... No one in my family even noticed!

The record's sales merited no place on any chart of any kind. Nelson made a chart topping record, which I own and have never listened to, with Ray Price in this era; I have no idea who Ray Price even is.

Ever since his outstanding mid-60's run of records Roger Miller had done nothing whatsoever of musical consequence, except, of course, perform as a cartoon chicken.

And just look at the cover. Do the Grammys give out an award for Best Costuming? If so, this record would not win. Nelson is dressed in a New Balance workout tank top and sneakers; what, were his Reebok duds in the wash? Or maybe he had an athletic contract with New Balance! The Willie Nelson workout craze: get high and record yet another album in double time. And what's with Miller saluting us through his backside? Was he copying Willie and tooting out the musical fruit? In case you just can't get enough of the image, Nelson and Miller offer up its gassy reverse on the rear:

But the biggest reason to doubt the merits of this record is the direction Nelson took in terms of his arrangements in the 80's. We're talking drum pads, choirs, hand claps and schmaltz. The Red Headed Stranger made way for Cheese Farts and Danger.

For example, Willie's version of the summer camp classic City of New Orleans should be a thing of easy, spacious beauty. All the track needs is for Mickie Raphael to play a little sweet harmonica here and there, Nelson's sister Bobbie to add a whiskey saloon's tinkling keys and Willie, strumming on his legendary six string and singing his quavering heart out.

But far too often we don't get what we want from One-Eyed Willie in the 80's. Instead we get what sounds like the soundtrack for a Dan Quayle campaign spot:

Yuck.

And so it was a huge relief just now when I actually dropped the needle on this thing. The opening title track, penned, like almost everything else on the record, by Miller himself, sounds downright lovely. We've got real drums, tasty lead acoustic, Miller still sounds like his fantastic self and Willie sounds like he's got the right workout in mind.

Not everything is right. Things get weird on the second verse when a third amigo shows up to sing - this time, good grief, it's Ray Price (!) instead of Martin Short - and then a phallic saxophone and unnecessary choir shoulder their way in nonsensically. But I like what I hear on this opening track - if this is what Willie's farts smell like I'd like to spend some quality in his water closet.

The second track, Husbands and Wives, is one of Miller's greatest songs and the headlining two amigos cover it nicely without fuss. We've got welcome strings instead of the flaccid saxophone and the honky-tonk piano sounds great.

The rest of this record is more of the same. No note is surprising, Willie sings Miller's songs with care and devotion (though there is no sign of him needing to don athletic gear for the labors involved at any point), Miller sneaks in a few moments of his signature vocal gymnastics, and no one involved audibly breaks wind; rather they cut some actual cheese, lay out some actual crackers and spend a highly enjoyable afternoon together recording an album no one but me will ever listen to again. It's great!

[female-malice]

At the start of February, Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, announced a major scaling back of its operations, exiting wind markets in Portugal, Spain and Norway and cutting both its dividend and its 2030 target for the number of new installations. The announcement followed the firm’s shock decision last November to back out of two major wind projects in New Jersey. Last week, it agreed to sell stakes in four US onshore wind farms for around $300m.

But Ørsted’s troubles are hardly unique. In September 2023, the UK government’s offshore wind auction failed to secure a single project from developers, who argued that the government-guaranteed prices on offer were too low in the face of rising costs. Two months before that, Vattenfall pulled out of a major wind UK development for the same reason. And in February, the German energy giant RWE – which provides 15 per cent of the UK’s power – warned that without more money on offer, the UK’s next auction, opening this month, might just fail again.

These cases are only a handful among many and have come as jarring setbacks for an industry grown accustomed to triumphalism: headlines over recent years have routinely celebrated the plunging cost of renewables and the seemingly unrelenting transition to clean energy advancing around the world. A quick Google of “renewable energy deployment” yields no shortage of charts with impressive upward slopes.

Much of this enthusiasm has centred on a metric called the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), which represents the average cost per unit of electricity generated over the lifetime of a generator, be it a wind farm or a gas power station. The LCOE has something of a cult status among industry analysts, journalists and even the International Energy Agency as the definitive marker of the transition to clean energy. When the LCOE of renewables falls below that of traditional fossil fuel sources, the logic goes, the transition to clean energy will be unstoppable. If only it was that simple, argues the economic geographer Brett Christophers in his latest book The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.

As Christophers writes: “Everyone, seemingly, has gravitated to the view that, now they are cheaper/cheapest, renewables are primed for an unprecedented golden growth era” that will see them supplant fossil fuels. Doing so will be no mean feat. Despite the vertiginous growth of new renewable capacity in recent years, renewables have scarcely made a dent in the proportion of global power that comes from fossil fuels. The overall share of fossil fuel power in the energy mix has remained broadly stagnant for an astonishing four decades, from 64 per cent in 1985 to 61 per cent in 2022. Critically, the absolute amount of fossil fuel power generated each year – the figure that ultimately matters for the climate – has continued to rise.

In large part, this stems from overall growth in electricity consumption, which will continue apace in the coming decades as millions around the world gain access to electricity and as we race to electrify the economy. Thus, for all their upward momentum, global electricity consumption is still growing faster than solar and wind power is coming online, meaning the gap is widening. To close it, by the IEA’s estimates, the world needs to install 600 GW (gigawatts) of solar and 340 GW of wind capacity every year between 2030 and 2050. By comparison, the UK’s current total installed wind capacity is approximately 30GW, the sixth largest in the world, while Germany’s domestic transition plan implies installing the equivalent of 43 football pitches of solar panels every day to 2050. In short: the task is immense – almost unimaginably so. It is similarly urgent.

Where will the momentum needed to build this clean energy future come from? As Christophers documents in detail, the industry has thus far relied on an array of subsidy and support around the world. Extensive state support is hardly unique to clean energy, much as detractors and climate deniers may like to highlight it: the fossil fuel industry benefited from tax breaks and direct subsidy to the tune of £5.5trn in 2022 according to the IMF. The declining LCOE of renewable energy has been increasingly viewed as an argument for unwinding this government-backed support. As Christophers shows, however, in practice this has proven a near-impossibility. The question he therefore asks is why, in the face of declining costs, subsidies continue to be necessary, and what this tells us about whether the current approach to decarbonisation is fit for purpose.

The answer, Christophers argues, is that we’ve got it all upside down. When it comes to investment in renewable energy, as in anything else, it’s not cheapness that matters. Just take it from the investors themselves, he notes, citing one former JPMorgan investor who described the LCOE as a “practical irrelevance”. What matters instead is profit, and expectations of it.

Despite its simplicity, Christophers’s account is a quietly radical one that contravenes the received wisdom of not only the technocrats, mainstream economists and free marketeers who tout the wonders of the market, but also many on the left, for whom the problem with profits is typically their being far too high. Instead, as he demonstrates, the trouble is that renewable energy is nowhere near profitable enough, and certainly not reliably so, for the market to deliver it with anything like the pace, scale or certainty that is needed.

If the costs of renewables are indeed so low, one might ask, and profits are equal to revenues minus costs, then surely plunging costs should mean higher profits. But Christophers shows that low and unreliable profits are the definitive obstacle to the decarbonisation of the electricity system and, by extension, the wider economy.

The precise answer as to why low costs don’t necessarily translate into high and steady profits in this sector is technically complex and multifaceted, deftly handled by Christophers, a reformed management consultant, over nearly 400 pages of fine detail drawn from company documents, interviews and dense sectoral reports from global energy agencies. Put simply, the core of the problem is that the very features of markets so celebrated by mainstream economics – mediation via the price signal, increasing competition and private investment – are the undoing of a private-sector led transition to clean energy.

For Christophers, the commitment to marketisation in electricity systems is increasingly self-defeating. At the heart of this problem is the so-called “wholesale market” that prevails in many parts of the US and Europe, including the UK. Under this system, generators are paid a single price per unit of electricity for a given period, regardless of whether it is derived from a wind turbine or a coal plant. This price is based on what’s called a “merit order”, with the cheapest sources – generally renewables – being deployed first, followed by as many sources as are needed in order of escalating price. The wholesale is set by the last unit of energy needed to meet demand. In the UK, this is typically gas.

The defining feature of this wholesale pricing system, cast in sharp relief over the period of sky-high energy prices in 2021-2022, is volatility. With a host of factors potentially feeding into the price – from the balance of supply and demand through to global gas prices and geographic location – the swings can be enormous, regularly spiking from double to triple digit prices and back again within a matter of hours. In times of crisis, the figures can become outlandish, with the price of electricity in Texas during the state’s 2021 shock winter storms reaching $9,000 per MWh.

For Christophers, this volatility is nothing short of “an existential threat” to the “bankability” of a renewable project – that is, its ability to secure financing – because it makes profitability so uncertain. Worse still, within a competitive wholesale market, as the proportion of renewable generation in the market grows, and by extension the proportion of time in which renewables drive the wholesale price, the more frequently and strongly prices swing to the lower extreme, a phenomenon known as “price cannibalisation”.

The energy industry and governments rely on an impressive array of methods to circumvent these problems, from financial hedging to feed-in-tariffs, and from mega corporate Power Purchase Agreements with the likes of Amazon and Google to the UK’s “contracts-for-difference”. As Christophers writes: the reality of “liberalised electricity systems such as Europe’s is that, to secure financing, renewables developers ordinarily do everything they can… to avoid selling their output at the market price.”

Thus, despite ultra-high wholesale prices over 2021-2022, many renewables generators failed to enjoy correspondingly high profits, because they had traded the possibility of these certainties in the face of intolerable market volatility. For Christophers, this is the “signal feature” of the liberalised electricity market: that “the hallowed market price… is the one price that renewables operators endeavour not to sell at.”

It is in explaining this apparent contradiction that the book offers its most radical suggestion. Borrowing Karl Polanyi’s concept of a “fictitious commodity”, Christophers ultimately contends that electricity – like land, labour and money, Polanyi’s original trio – is not a commodity in the conventional sense of having been created for sale, and is therefore ill-suited to market exchange and coordination. This incompatibility sits at the root of the spiralling complexity of interventions that policymakers are obligated to make in the name of upholding the freedom of the “market”. The result, in the words of the energy expert Meredith Angwin, is that today’s electricity markets are less market and more “bureaucratic thicket”.

Thankfully, if the forces of capitalism, defined in terms of private ownership and the profit imperative, are fundamentally ill-equipped for this task, then we are not for want of alternatives. Public ownership and financing of energy, if freed from a faux market and the straitjacket of the profit motive, seems an obvious one. Christophers writes that the state is the only actor with “both the financial wherewithal and the logistical and administrative capacity” to take on the challenge of decarbonisation. The trouble though, when all you have is a hammer, is that everything looks like a nail. Thus, in the face of irreconcilable market failures, most policymakers seem only to offer more market-based fudges.

In this context, the tremors in renewable energy investment that we have seen with increasing frequency over the past several months are more than just a blip. They represent a potentially fatal flaw in the prevailing approach to the task of decarbonisation. From the perspective of the climate, every tonne of carbon matters, and every delay is significant. To continue to leave the future of electricity, and by extension global decarbonisation, to the whims of profit-motivated firms, is an intolerable risk. Rome is already burning, and there’s no time left to fiddle.